The Bald Knobbers were a group which claimed to be devoted to law and order, but which went very, very wrong. This book has a sort of moral similarity: It's supposed to be about the Bald Knobbers, but it went very wrong.

The Knobbers worked in Missouri in the 1880s, at a time when literacy was limited and fear of neighbors was strong -- the Civil War was still a vivid memory, and people in Missouri had fought on both sides. In Taney County, Missouri, in particular, law-breaking was frequent and the authorities were almost powerless. The Bald Knobbers arose in this period to deal with the high crime rate -- but went on to simply harass and threaten those with whom they did not agree.

This book is an account of the Bald Knobbers based on the newspaper accounts of the time. Or so it claims, and certainly much of the text reads like nineteenth century newspapers. But this results in several problems. First, the result is highly incoherent, because a series of newspaper accounts do not a complete story make. And second, the accounts are not documented. Nowhere are we told which newspaper published which account when, or even if the accounts were blended. (We know that some were.) This is, of course, legal, because the copyrights expired long ago. But it is not good procedure. We have no way of knowing what is likely to be reliable and what is not; we don't even have a way to know what is the original text and what is author Anderson's glue.

The result is basically useless. This could have been a good book -- as far as I know, no other author has compiled newspaper accounts of the period. But without the scholarly apparatus, it's little more than hysterical journalism. ( )